old toys Archives - Circles in the SandCircles in the Sand

Each year in England, it always astounds me that my Mum has kept so many of our childhood things – and is now happily selling them on eBay.

Our 100-year-old antique rocking horse has been sold, but to my delight, she still has my china tea set, wooden recorder and dolls’ house with electric lights (used, in more recent times, as parking space for the vintage, lead-paint matchbox cars).

I’ve posted before about rediscovering my collection of scented rubbers. (No sniggering over there in the US! The British word for eraser is rubber). Goodness knows what chemicals they were made with – probably something quite addictive to a 9-year-old girl.

But it was this year that it was really brought home to me just how much time has passed since my brother and I were small – and that the toys we used to play with might actually be worth something.

Here’s what’s on the floor in a spare room upstairs:

For baby-boomers, the name Fisher-Price is synonymous with childhood (remember the airport set? Complete with a turning luggage carousel and suitcases)

And, below, is a photo I took in the US – at a toy museum:

We have the pull-along dog somewhere, too, in the attic

While it was the children who wanted to visit the toy museum, it was me who found myself lingering in the aisles, loving the trip down vintage toy lane:

1952: Mr Potato Head, the first toy ever advertised on television, was released

1956: Ant Farms were developed

Over the years, he’s been joined by Mrs Potato Head and supplemented with accessories such as a car and a boat trailer

1957: Frisbees were invented

1958: The Hula Hoop arrived

1959: The first Barbie Dolls were released

1960: Etch-A-Sketch, Chatty Cathy and Fisher-Price’s Rock-a-Stack were popular toys

1962: Fisher-Price’s Chatter Telephone was introduced

1963: The Easy Bake Oven was released, and Matchbox offered toy cars with doors that opened

1964: GI Joe was released during the Cold War

1971: Mastermind, the code-breaking board game with pegs, became the most successful new game of the 1970s

1983: In the run-up to Christmas, parents frantically searched everywhere for the coveted Cabbage Patch Kids dolls

It’s all a far cry from the hi-tech gadgets that will leave even the most savvy parents scratching their head and reaching for the instructions this year – if Hamley’s annual predicted Christmas best sellers list is anything to go by. Among the top 10 toys are:

– A WiFi-connected doll that does homework

– Xeno, an interactive monster with pullout snot, farting capability and 40 different expressions

– Barbie’s Colour Change handbag – hold it against any item of clothing and press a button to match more than 100 different shades

– Kiddizoom Smart Watch – as well as showing the time, it can also take and edit photos, record videos and play three built-in games

– Teksta T-Rex, a robotic dinosaur that walks, moves its head, sniffs and chews on its favourite bone, then spits it out with a giant burp

– Doh Vinci 3D Deluxe Styler

– Ice Skating Anna and Elsa dolls from the Disney movie Frozen

Hope you enjoyed the memories – and the modern-day equivalents!

I was so impressed on holiday when my seven-year-old niece was given a kit of interlocking pieces and managed to keep all the bits together – apart from two segments that were duly searched for and located.

Lego bricks: Still popular after 79 years

Having produced two unruly boys, our toy boxes are a mish-mash of broken pieces, bashed-up trains and planes, crashed cars, severed Lego heads and stray batteries.

I do go through their vast toy collection from time to time and try to sift out the debris, but it’s a losing battle – the pieces seem to breed and I’m forever finding broken axles and airplane parts scattered around the house.

I can’t remember the last time we did a puzzle that had all the pieces. If a toy does happen to be in good condition, it’s probably because it’s ‘too boring’ to play with.

Then there’s the ‘creative’ way they use objects that aren’t toys at all: I’d already mentioned how, on a previous visit to England, oldest son rolled the living room pouffe everywhere pretending it was a boulder. On another visit, he hung mum’s entire silk scarf collection over the stairs, fashionably arranged as make-believe snakes.

Today, he found a novel use for a garden tent and raced around the garden with it on his head in a Dalek-like manner.

An antique when I was little, this rocking horse must be 100 years old!

All this brings me to something I do enjoy while staying at my parents’. My mum keeps everything, and while I may get frustrated when the drawers are full to the brim, I just love it when she pulls out my old toys.

There’s the antique rocking horse, my old china tea-set, wooden recorder, the Jack-in-the-box (which scared the living daylights out of BB when he was little!), my brother’s wooden train that you pull along by string, original Mr Men books, and my dolls’ house with electric lights (now used by my boys as parking space for the lead-paint-covered veteran matchbox cars that were actually ‘Made in England’).

The model railway in the garage: Dad

But the thing train-mad BB loves most at our British abode is my Dad’s model train set, which dates back to the 60s. It now takes up the whole garage and BB can disappear in there for hours. And when he’s had enough in the garage, he comes outside to be the not-so-fat controller of the steam train running on Dad’s garden railway.

I was sure that somewhere in the attic there would be a Girl’s World circa 1982 – the styling head that gave me hours of make-over fun (and one of the most inspiring toys a girl could own back then!) – but I just found out she’s no more because I chopped all her hair off when I was nine. And there was me thinking that little girls always play nicely!